Missed our earlier webinar, & quot; Beyond the Release - CI That Transforms & quot;? Check out the recap below.

In this webinar, we discourse the power of CI and possible considerations for the hereafter. One of the more interesting panorama of the webinar was witness the modern pipeline with the new Sauce CI Dashboard alongside Cloudbees & # x27; automation templates. We also conducted a small CI survey at the commencement of the webinar, and ended with a Q & amp; A.

The Power of CI

Uninterrupted Delivery and Deployment (CD) steal the show in DevOps conversations, but the realness is that Delivery and Deployment are not for every governance, nor are they already widely adopt. In order to move on to speech and deployment, organizations must get Uninterrupted Integration (CI) right — unless they were build from day one with the DevOps model, and did not hold to fit the process into survive environments.

The reason CI is so powerful is that it grant you to dip your toe into the modern speech line without the risk or complexity of building out delivery and deployment all at once - and with the potential of failure. You can consider CI as the on-boarding for DevOps. And from a process and tool standpoint, CI is nearly monovular to bringing and deployment, it means that erst you get it right you can easy move on.

Webinar - CI Survey Results

I & # x27; m pleased to say the results of the Sauce Labs CI survey were nearly exactly what I expected, served with a side of surprise. For me, the most interesting aspect of the survey results is how they appear to be in conflict with the perceived high CI adoption and success rate already existing in the market. Let ’ s look at the results among 500+ attendees:

What Types of Automated Tests do you run?

• Unit 28%

• Functional 40 %

• Integration 27 %

• None 6%

6 % of the attendees are not running automate test at all! This was astonish to me. I wait 1 % at most, particularly given the audience, because they are already familiar with mechanization. At a minimum, I would expect all companionship to automate Unit try. However there is a high likelihood that what this 6 % is saying is that they hold automated tests, just pioneer manually. The results likewise showed that many are running functional exam. This is outstanding! However, only 27 % are running integration tryout. This is troubling because compared to the report 45 % who state they are doing CI already, the lack of integration testing would seem to contradict that statement. I suspect that this is a definition problem, where some may define CI as being simply a shared testing surround, and not really the CI process as draw in the webinar.

Do you have an Integration environment?

77 % of the audience account receive an integration environment, yet only 27 % have automated integration testing. This could be an indication that base was the focus over process.

And the idea continued.

SUSA automates exploratory testing with persona-driven behavior, catching bugs that scripted automation misses.

Where are you with CI?

• Thinking about it - 16 %

• Just getting part - 37 %

• Got it down; ready to conduct the adjacent pace - 45 %

45 % have it down! This also surprises me, as the earlier numbers indicate that 74 % receive not yet finish automation of the entire pot. Without full CI automation, it is a reach to go to CD, where you have no choice but to automatise everything. But the fact that 53 % of organizations have not or are simply get is consistent with my reflection.

Webinar Q & amp; A - Follow-Up Answers

Now I & # x27; d like to showcase my favourite part of the webinar, the Q & amp; A. We get a great set of questions and were capable to address most during the event, but here are the 1 I want to highlight with additional reaction:

Q: What are the challenge of use CI in a Cloud environment?A: One of the misconceptions about CI infrastructure is that it is one location, and static. The idea of consolidation substructure is that it can be twirl up and torn down on demand, and the best scheme is used for the operation. For example, it is not needs true that all functional tests run with Unit. The biggest challenge of use Cloud solutions is integration and morphing existing processes. Where CI fails is near often in the lack of plan around the process. If the process is solid, then it ’ s relatively easy to introduce any number of consolidation surroundings, and have oversight on their solvent and recurrent utilisation.

Q: What cultural element are absolutely necessary for CI to (a) happen and (b) sustain?A: Shared motivation for results, no barriers, and no ownership. Integration environments are like the application/code café. Everyone comes together. Which means that the creation of these surround need to be autonomous, and exposed. For model, there can not be a ticketing process to obtain CI VMs or access to Cloud solutions. And thither demand to be flexibleness in who can do what. So this means there can not be any roadblock between IT, Dev, and QA. QA should be capable to propose change to the integral squad, for example. You can achieve this by define a share objective that is all about results. The results equal finding bugs and resolve them faster. With this end, more commits and more iterations in the integrating environment will bechance course. This drives more releases per commit, more automation in the CI environment, and more interaction among the entire squad.

The beauty of the CI summons is that failure is inevitable, and when issues occur, they have little impact on anything but time. So adding sensitivity to the environment only limits the ability to use it. What needs to be easily established are form on the environment, such as framework variation, etc. This is where using a Cloud solution is nice because it assure that consistency. Deploy, deploy, trial, tryout as much and as fast as you can.

Q: How does CI facilitate alimony of a small application when the cost of maintaining CI is a bit high for the application?A: It is true that the larger the team and application, the more justifiable the cost of base and joyride around CI. But on the flipside, the ability to set up API calls and Webhooks for smaller applications is easier than for those that are large. This is generally due to less dependencies and the number of integration points. For small applications, the goal should be CI that is 100 % PaaS-based in Cloud quiz environment, so that the ONLY effort is integration. This come at a low cost when it is done by developers while they are coding.

Q: How effectively can we integrate a test automation rooms into CI?A: The basis of this question is a bit concern because it would imply that the automation was developed in a silo. Good automation should be transportable from ad-hoc boxes to a similar CI environment. And the engine that drive the combined set of mechanization is fair easy to cable up. What is lose in this question is the type of testing.

One of the biggest benefit Sauce brings to functional testing specifically is the offloading of monumental examination grids that arrive at a turgid dollar and opportunity cost. And here, like many early Cloud solutions, the integration point is an API with a secure tunnel to your on-prem or Cloud IaaS testing environment which construe the results, pass scripts from your try suite, and manages the rinsing and repeat.

Q: Does optimize and full usage of CI really experience much of an effect on quality or release agenda? It & # x27; s simply an automation of the checkout-build-deploy-test process, so it should technically not experience any effect on character of product or release schedule, right?A: Ouch. This one hurt my soul a little. If CI is not substantially increasing the caliber of your coating and the number of freeing you are working on, you & # x27; re doing it incorrect. It should not just be a matter of automatise existing processes. Instead, it should go like this:

Developers & # x27; commits end up in refreshful CI surround, therefore there will be more frequent liberation to CI, so it follows that there will be more frequently run automated tests. With more tests, more bug are catch before bringing, thusly the toll per bug is less because it hap earlier on in the process and there are fewer glitch in product. It follows that the toll of decide bug is less, both in clam and opportunity cost to the reserve ... and all this means that your customers are happier.

If you consider volume of releases entirely, you can find ROI. But you can go beyond that: if you have a great CI environment, you can fail forward with higher risk functionality. This entail merchandise improvements come much faster, so both the existent and opportunity ROI are tremendous.

We often forget that proactive is far better than responsive. Similarly, we block that the more bugs you experience the more bugs you will receive, so without CI you are increasing the price of all downstream processes.

Conclusion

When you get CI right, you can locomote downstream to high-speed testing on mock applications, service virtualization, and pipelines driven by container. On the flipside, if you do not get CI right, you can not expect to move on to delivery and deployment.

Based on the survey and questions, it seems that there is a lot of confusion both on the definition of CI, and where the market really is with CI matureness. It would betoken to me that there is a lot to learn when it comes to CI, and that there are a ton of theory for improvement as well.

Chris Riley is a engineer who has spend 12 years assist organizations transition from traditional development pattern to a modern set of culture, procedure and joyride. In increase to be a research psychoanalyst, he is an O ’ Reilly writer, veritable speaker, and capable topic expert in the areas of DevOps Strategy and culture and Enterprise Content Management. Chris believes the biggest challenge faced in the tech market is not tools, but kinda people and preparation.

Throughout Chris ’ s vocation he has crossed the purpose of selling, product direction, and engineering to gain a unequaled view of how the deep technical is expend to solve real-world problems. By working with both early adopters and late, he has catch technologies mature from rough solutions to essential and transparent. In addition to spending his time understanding the market he helps ISVs sell B2D and practitioner of DevOps Strategy. He is interested in machine-learning, and the intersection of BigData and Information Management.